Who's Citing Whose Writings? A Corpus Based Study of Citations as Interpersonal Resource in English Medium National and English Medium International Journals

Hewings, Ann; Lillis, Theresa; Vladimirou, Dimitra

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, v9 n2 p102-115 Jun 2010

Citation is a key means by which authors signal their affiliation to their disciplinary community and the place of their work within it. Choices made regarding what work to cite is a crucial aspect of the interpersonal dimension of academic texts, with the act of citing making visible a network of scholarly relations. Citation choices indicate, among other things, an author's estimation of previous work in their field, help to construct the author as a member of his or her disciplinary community, and provide an opportunity to promote his or her own work, or the work of colleagues. The paper draws on a 1.5 million word corpus of published psychology articles and uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore in particular the citation practices of scholars working in non-Anglophone contexts, but publishing their research in English. The aim of this paper is to foreground the significance of the geolinguistic dimension to citation practices which is often backgrounded in studies of scholarly disciplinary community building. (Contains 2 figures and 6 tables.)